The Danville News

Robert John Andrews

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 “Neighbors”

Word Count: 750

 

Given how Fred Roger’s Day arrives tomorrow, it seemed a beautiful day to write about neighbors.  “Won’t you be my neighbor?  Fred sings how the real issue isn’t some academic discussion of who is our neighbor.  Lyrically, the refrain asks instead: Are we being neighborly?  Current events turned this song into a dirge about the opposite of neighborliness:  war. 

 

The real motivation for war hardly ever is the excuse we shout when we cry out for war.  Truth becomes war’s first casualty.  Lines get drawn.  There’s righteous us and there’s evil them, and the script requires we ignore trying to listen why enemies believe their cause is right.  War demands absolute and loyal obedience to the state, which runs contrary to faith.  But then, religion often weakly bows before the state and becomes its dominated paramour.  War rarely is taken seriously, except by those who do the shooting and bombing and by those who are bombed and shot.  I recommend that everyone reads Mark Twain’s “War Prayer.”  It presents what horrors church-goers, in whose breasts “burned the holy fire of patriotism,” really prayed for when the “pastor preached devotion of flag and country and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause.” 

 

Christianity’s classical doctrine of Just War – citing the conditions of Just Cause, Competent Authority, Right Intention, Last Resort, Probability of Success, and Proportionality – merely begin to frame the discussion, but is inadequate given today’s realities of front-line citizens, global terrorism, biochemical madness, nuclear nightmare, rampant ideology. 

 

A modern German theologian named Karl Barth, schooled by his opposition to and experience of Nazi Germany, crafted a more compelling theology of war.  Every saber-rattling country should first ask these following questions.  Answer them honestly. 

 

Barth stipulates that if we say ‘yes’ to any of the following, a state is NOT justified in engaging in war:  1) Does our state desire to expand politically, geographically, or economically, extending its frontiers, authority, and dominion? 2) Does our state think it is necessary to rectify its internal conditions, bringing about unity, by external adventure? 3) Does our state consider that its honor and prestige are violated by the actions or attitudes of another state? 4)  Does our state feel it is threatened by a shift in the balance of power among other states? 5) Does our state think it sees in the internal conditions of another state, whether revolutionary or reactionary, a reason for displeasure or anxiety? 6) Does our state believe it can and should ascribe to itself an historical mission, fulfilling some sort of destiny, that our state has a superiority to control others?

 

You may recognize how war is sin itself, proof of human failure, ever immoral, a judgment upon us, even when human inhumanity makes it unavoidable.  Never ought war be considered normal or inevitable.  Why do we sustain a military?  Because we want peace, while acknowledging human depravity. 

 

If we says ‘yes’ to these following questions, then we are ready to suffer the sin of conducting war:  1) Have we entered the wholly abnormal situation of emergency in which our state’s very existence and autonomy is menaced and attacked? 2) Does our state, which is not itself directly threatened or attacked, consider itself summoned by obligation of a treaty or in some other way to come to the aid of a weaker neighbor which does actually find itself in such a situation of extreme emergency? 3) Do our people have serious grounds for not being able to assume responsibility for the surrender of their independence? 4) Is one state forcing another state into yielding something that must not be betrayed, something that is necessarily more important than the preservation of life itself? 5) Have we set aside all false and inadequate reasons for war? 6) Is our society prepared for the consequences? 7) Has the state said and done all that there is to be said about true peace and the practical avoidability of war? 8) Has the church voiced that peace is the real emergency to which our time, power, and ability must be devoted. 9) Do we see war in its terribly reality? 10) Will we assume personal responsibility for the war? 11) Are we willing to enact national mandatory conscription? 12) Are we willing to have our sons and daughters killed for this emergency? 13) Are we going to war regardless the prospect of success?

 

If we say ‘yes’ to these, forgive us. “Would you be mine? Could you be mine?”